Newbie with conversion question, HTML to PDF? Options

[Kevin Korotev]

Hello!
Let me first apologize for probably picking the wrong category to post this. I am clueless on the subject and "shooting in the dark".

I have a 20 year old cd copied to my pc hard drive. It is a photo album in HTML form. Multiple folders and such.
One must click on the main "index.html" to access the Table of Contents page where many "chapters" are listed,
categorized, of course. It is completely useable and friendly if you know these few rules of navigation.
I want to distribute this to family members in a single file/self-contained way (large as it may end up being) that eliminates all the necessary folders and such.
PDF?
Is this possible?

Kevin

[Christian J]

Hello!

PDF sounds like the simplest way, though I have no personal experience.

Otherwise, to distribute it in a single file you could simply make a Zip file of the HTML files and images. But then users still must unzip it, and then learn to click the index.html file.

If you want to avoid folders, you might combine all the pages into a single HTML file with internal links to the chapter sections. Image files can be converted to Base64 format, which lets them be embedded in the actual HTML code. All this may require a bit of work though, depending on how big the photo album is.

[Kevin Korotev]

Thanks for responding, but you're talking about 6 feet above my head.

[Brian Chandler]

Thanks for responding, but you're talking about 6 feet above my head.

I'm afraid the short answer is "No". The effort required by family members to work out how to acess the pictures in their current form is vastly less than the effort required by you to learn enough about "how the web works" in order to be able to reorganise this. You could end up with a web server so that the html organisation was simply available for them to click on. But this involves learning how to use the relevant tools; you need a solution, which in practice means doing everything manually; somewhere that will "host" your pictures (social media, google or something), and you simply copy them one by one from your html archive to whatever places they provide. Of course you will lose all of the organisation, but no doubt some very clever software (think "Artificial Stupidity") will determine which pictures it thinks your family want to look at next.

[Christian J]

Thanks for responding, but you're talking about 6 feet above my head.

Note that I posted three separate ideas. The third/last one does require a lot of work and some knowledge, but making a Zip or PDF file of the entire photo album shouldn't be too hard with a decent converting program.

[Kevin Korotev]

I was a frustrated smartass with my first response. My apologies. Thank-you both
for spending YOUR time on MY problem. I really do appreciate it.
Kevin

[Christian J]

You're welcome!